Problem: You're a developer, you've been working hard on something and even though you see 1,000s of downloads and have lots of happy users, you're still barely seeing a handful of donations. This has come up plenty of times in the past 10 years but I finally decided to put together a thread on this topic after the excellent FileOptimizer decided to go nagware.

The critical elements I see is making it simple, painless, and make users feel involved in the program's continued improvement.

All I can say is to be humble about it, I'm much more likely to donate to something when that's the case, but when things start turning into threats like "Progress is going to stop unless..." or constant nagging, begging and reminding, then I'm much more likely to look for alternatives. Oh and limiting features... a good way to kill the reasons why people liked your product in the first place, PeStudio, ReNamer, etc.

Oh and never ever follow the route that the FreeFileSync dev did by putting adware/malware into the installer.

It's worth pointing out that accepting donations via Amazon without being a legally structured nonprofit is against the terms of service (even if it isn't directly stated as such at the time) and they will permanently kill the ability for your Amazon account to ever user Amazon Pay as a payer or payee. Source: me/PortableApps.com

Patreon seems to work better for folks regularly creating artistic content as well as pinup-style photo sites. I haven't seen as many people getting it to work successfully with development.

gratipay (formerly flattr) still seems to have hardly any users. Even large projects used by lots of people like Reddit Enhancement Suite struggle to break $5 a week.

bitcoin can work depending on your audience (ie does it overlap with people who are fans of bitcoin?). PortableApps.com has gotten over a thousand dollars via bitcoin over the last 3.5 years. We only got a few dollars via the other cryptocurrencies and none at all via ETH.

The priority access thing can work for closed source stuff but not as well with open source.

It's worth pointing out that accepting donations via Amazon without being a legally structured nonprofit is against the terms of service (even if it isn't directly stated as such at the time) and they will permanently kill the ability for your Amazon account to ever user Amazon Pay as a payer or payee.

I couldn't find anything in the TOS about that but I'm not thrilled with using Amazon for anything so I'll just strike that from the list.

JohnTHaller wrote:

Patreon seems to work better for folks regularly creating artistic content as well as pinup-style photo sites. I haven't seen as many people getting it to work successfully with development.

Good to know.

JohnTHaller wrote:

bitcoin can work depending on your audience (ie does it overlap with people who are fans of bitcoin?). PortableApps.com has gotten over a thousand dollars via bitcoin over the last 3.5 years. We only got a few dollars via the other cryptocurrencies and none at all via ETH.

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